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As I came down the stairs I heard somebody moaning in the general vicinity of the kitchen.
Unnhh.
Mmmfff. Unh-huh.
Mmm-mmm-mmm-unh.
What the hell is going on, I wondered?
Standing over the kitchen island, eyes closed, murmuring to himself is my spouse.
With a half-eaten jar of pickles in his hand.
"Oh my God, these are so good."
"Good," he said, as if I didn’t hear him the first time through the mouthful of pickles. "My mom would have loved these, these are soooo good. What are they?"
Just bread and butter pickles. Pickles and peppers from our garden, and some big sweet onions from the farmers’ market, with some extra garlic.
That was a week ago. He’s eaten another jar since then. I don’t think I’ve made enough to make it through the winter, at this rate of consumption.
Try them yourself, they’re easy to make. But you’d better do it soon if you live in northern climes as hard frosts will take out the rest of the pickle crop over the next couple of weeks.
Oh, and as for the pickle prep: I used my old Salad Shooter to slice the pickles. It made short work of the small pickles, although some of the larger diameter cukes had to be sliced in half lengthwise before I could put them through the machine. The same guy who glutted himself on pickles was pretty skeptical about the thickness of the pickle slices; he thought they’d be too thin to be crisp. Obviously not a problem at all.
Bread and Butter Pickles
Ingredients:
25 pickling cucumbers, sliced thin
2 large onions, peeled and sliced thin
2 sweet or bell peppers, sliced or chopped bite-sized or smaller
3 cloves garlic, minced finely
1/2 cup pickling salt
3 cups cider vinegar
5 cups white sugar
2 TBSP. mustard seed
1 1/2 tsp. celery seed
1/2 tsp. whole cloves
1 TBSP. ground turmeric
1 TBSP. red pepper flakes (OPTIONAL – add if you like sweet-and-spicy)
Instructions:
1. Place prepared vegetables into a large bowl. Sprinkle the salt over the vegetables and toss together gently until salt has been evenly incorporated. Let stand approximately 3 hours.
Wash and prep jars and lids for canning.
2. About 20 minutes before the vegetables have finished brining, pour the cider vinegar, white sugar, mustard seed, celery seed, whole cloves and turmeric into a large pot. The pot must big enough for all of the vegetables. Bring the vinegar-sugar-spice mixture to a boil and then turn down to a simmer.
Sterilize jars and lids in boiling water and have at the ready; prepare hot water bath canner.
3. Drain the salty liquid from the vegetables; rinse the vegetables with very cold water three times to remove excess salt, then drain the vegetables thoroughly in a large colander. (The colder the water, the better as it will ensure the cuke slices retain their crispness. Add ice to the water if necessary.)
Gently stir drained vegetables into the boiling vinegar-sugar-spice mixture. Turn up heat, stirring gently; turn down heat to warm just before vegetables reach boiling point.
4. Ladle hot pickle mixture into sterilized jars, leaving 1/2 inch head room. Seal and process in hot water bath for 30 minutes.
[Cross-posted at Rayne Today; photos by Rayne.]
22 Comments
Yum.
By the way, I didn’t use all the onions or peppers shown in the photo, only two of each. The onions were very big, could barely hold them in my hand. The peppers are a sweet oblong pepper with a thinner wall than bell peppers; I used red ones because I like the contrast with the green of the pickles.
And I used twice as much garlic. Never enough garlic.
This sounds really good–thanks for sharing!
Bread and butters are delicious. My entire family used to make them every summer when I was a child, from ingredients from our garden. Yum!
Rayne, great photos and thanks for the recipe. I am thinking next year I’m going to set up some shelves in the little underground room I have so that I can do some canning. A friend made refrigerator pickles this summer that were delicious, similar to your recipe, but clearly not prepared for shelf life out of refrigerator. So, I’m saving this recipe for next summer when I have a place to keep them. I think when my house was built (1923) that the yards were planned for backyard gardens. I am trying to revive the tradition and have spent much time this summer re-styling my yard for food production.
I have never done a lot of canning, so it will be a challenge I bet.
I just started a little bed of fall lettuce, will see if I can keep it going into the winter with some kind of cold frame or what not. I see the seeds are really sprouting this morning.
Groovy! the canning gets easier the more often you do it. A “Blue Book” for canning is a great resource to have on hand, and when you can’t find the answer in it, check for state and county extension offices on line. I double-checked the head space for pickles here, for example; I’d been using a copy of the Farm Journal Freezing and Canning cookbook, but I wanted to double-check a more contemporary resource. (And for the life of me I can’t lay my hands on my copy of the Blue Book.)
You’re ahead of me on the lettuce, should have started some weeks ago. But I left the cukes in the bed longer because they were still bearing fruit, and they’re in the spot intended for a cool weather crop of lettuce, mache and beet greens. A cold frame will be a must for me, now that frost is expected within the next week. I’m going to rig one up with flexible tubing and 8 mil plastic sheeting — more pics of that project when the time comes.
[edit: one more note about the pickles above: the Tupperware bowl in which I mixed and brined the veggies holds about 24 cups. I’ll estimate the volume of veggies before brining at 20-22 cups, in case you are concerned about how big/how many pickles to buy. I used 22 pickles, but some of them were quite large.]
Or you could use probiotics to inoculate the pickles rather than using the vinegar. This way both your taste buds and gut will do a happy dance. Ron makes pickles, kim chi, and sauerkraut like this. It is the really old fashion way. I think it was a Mongolian horde thing. By using the probiotics you can get the pickling done in a week. He has it set up in the shower in our bathroom. You do have to get a special lid for the container. It is the same vent that wine makers and beer makers us. This is so it won’t explode.
Here is the formula and container.
But I do think you have to keep it in the frig afterwards. Not sure how the Mongolian hordes dealt with that.
Do you have a website or something I can look at to find out more about the probiotics? That sounds really interesting, but is so new to me that I can’t even picture what you are talking about. I used to help my mom can sometimes, but I did the grunt work, so I’m pretty preservation illiterate.
Never mind, by the time I posted, your formula and container link had popped up. Thanks!
Thom Hartman talked about probiotics when he was here. Or about putting the critters back into our bodies that we need but have been stripped out by western medicine.
Rayne,
Those pics look so yummy. Me want pickle.
The recipe my mother got from her mother:
Bread and Butter Pickles
1 gallon cucumbers
3 large onions
Cut in slices and soak in salt water (1 cup to 1 gallon of water) overnight
2 quarts vinegar
4 cups sugar
1 tbsp turmeric (level)
1 tbsp ground mustard
1 tbsp celery seeds
Bring to a boil and boil 5 minutes
Drop cucumbers and onions in and bring to a boil. Can.
I think my mother used mustard seeds in hers.
My MIL used mustard seeds in hers, too; I think your mom’s mom’s recipe is very similar to the one she used, if memory serves. Your family recipe would be a bit more puckery because the ratio of vinegar to sugar is higher at 2-to-1, in contrast to the one I used at 3-to-5.
Which I believe is why my husband was carrying on so much; the pickles were really quite sweet, and he’s got a wicked sweet tooth.
Think if I can scrape up another batch of cukes before the frost I’ll try a batch more like your mom’s. I like my pickles with a little more pucker, and maybe I’ll be able to keep some on the shelf longer.
Good question about the Mongols, but I suspect they ate on the road rather than bringing everything with them. If they had brought their foods we might have seen more similarity in foods across the continent.
Don’t know about cukes and probiotics, but cabbage-based dishes are quite ancient in their use of probiotics. Korean kimchi in particular is a good example; the ripening process does use salt but not as much as sauerkraut because of the probiotic process. Salt acts not only as a seasoning agent, also draws water out of the cabbage. I suspect that holding the kimchi in earthenware crocks in the ground not only kept the kimchi cool, but allowed some of the moisture to evaporate off the cabbage — and bad bacteria wouldn’t like the resulting higher-salt-lower-water product. The spicy peppers, garlic, ginger and onion all some antibiotic effect as well, acting on bacteria which cause food poisoning. Add the vitamin C and the fiber contained in the same mixture and you have a super food before we even look at any additional probiotic effect.
and it is tasty. mmmmmmmm…
Are you the Rayne who wrote a book about chickens?
you can always make some emergency pickles….
Emergency Pickled Cauliflower and Carrots
Makes about 10-12 portions
Ingredients:
* 1 head cauliflower
* 1 onion
* 3 carrots peeled and sliced diagonal
* 1½ cups apple vinegar or apple cider vinegar if you prefer
* 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
* 3 cloves garlic
* 1 teaspoon salt. (I like to use sea salt for this)
* 1/3 cup ordinary white granulated sugar
* 2 Cups water
You will need a large saucepan, (or a stockpot, or a preserving pan) for this and one medium size saucepan.
Method:
1. Cut the cauliflower into 2 inch florets.
2. Peel and sliced the onion into thin rings.
3. Peel and slice the carrots thinly (if you can be bothered to make the extra effort you can slice them diagonally I usually can’t be bothered to do this I just slice ‘em thin and forget about geometry ….)
4. Peel and crush the garlic cloves in a garlic crusher OR mince them very finely with a knife.
5. Dump the cauliflower, onions, and carrots into a large saucepan of fast boiling water for exactly one minute. — They should be barely blanched.
6. After one minute dump them into a colander (or sieve) and put them under cold running water until they’ve stopped cooking and cooled off completely.
7. Leave them to drain.
8. In a smaller pot, bring the two cups of water the vinegar, turmeric, garlic, salt, and sugar to a fast rolling boil.
9. Stir to dissolve sugar
10. Once the sugar is dissolved remove from heat.
11. Put the blanched cooled cauliflower, onions, and carrots into a large bowl and pour vinegar/sugar/salt mixture over it.
12. Stir everything gently together until all the cauliflower is completely yellow.
13. Cover the bowl and refrigerate overnight.
14. Pour everything into clean glass jars the next day.
15. Keep the jars in your fridge. Theoretically the pickles will keep 5-6 weeks in the fridge. They’ve never had the opportunity in my household as we’ve generally yuffled them all by the end of week 3 at the latest.
Oh no, that’s not me, I don’t know much at all about chickens except that I cook them and eat them. Guess I’ll have to find that “doppelganger” and see if they have something to teach me about chickens, huh?
Oh yummy, thanks for that, mark! My mom makes something similar, but I think it also has celery chunks, olives and olive oil. I’ll have to try yours since I don’t care for the celery-version Mom makes.
By the way, I’m in need of some cucumber relish recipes. Anybody have one they like, I’m in the market. Too many big fat cucumbers after a heavy rain this past week, not the kind which will make good pickles.
Hey Toby & mark!
Can I make those emergency pickles with cucumbers and onions … and maybe carrots (as optional)? Would I blanch to carrots? I guess I could try celery in that like Rayne’s Mom’s recipe?
I never have been able to imagine canning ~ process & volume. But 5-6 weeks in the fridge for a batch of homemade sounds perfect for me.
Do you have a source for recipes like this?
Cheers & Thanks!